The Federal Government has assured Nigerians of transparent and equal distribution of social intervention programmes across the country.

The Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, made the promise at a meeting in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory.

The Minister noted that efforts would be made towards making all social intervention programmes transparent, to allow equal socio-economic development across Nigeria.

She added that: “The adoption of statistically-based poverty ranking mechanism for our country could be the solution to most of the ills of past interventions, and what had been said in various fora about failures of past efforts which primarily can be linked to duplication of past efforts, poor targeting and corruption”.

The meeting was attended by Commissioners of Planning from the 36 states across the country, who discussed how to ensure that each state gets a fair share of social interventions from government.

Some of the commissioners told reporters after the meeting that though only eight states have the complete register that is being used for the targeting system, it would be in at least 25 states before the end of 2017.

They expressed hope that the programmes would empower the youths and help them develop some skills to make them useful to their communities and Nigeria in general.